she's appointed to president obama's national commission on fiscal responsibility and reform. and she's currently a senior fellow at the brookings institution. thank you for being here tonight. >> happy to be here. >> you know much more about this than i do. you heard the intro, is there anything you want to add or correct anyway you see the fiscal cliff that you think people should know about? >> i thought your five points were good ones, especially the one about austerity, what we're talking about now is doing something really stupid as you said, and letting the wrong policies go into effect. too much deficit reduction, too quickly, and we could push the economy into a recession. that's just dumb. >> it is very dumb. now, you've been in many, many, many of these negotiations? you've been in the backrooms of a lot of the ongoing negotiations, now, do you think they have any chance of getting a deal before the first of the year? >> i'm always hopeful, but i'm less hopeful as every day passes. the problem is the rhetoric that's flying back and forth between republicans and demo